Editorial roundup

In a not-so-shocking twist, Bernie Sanders just announced he will run for President (again) in 2020. Though he calls himself a socialist, he’s running as a Democrat. That brings the field of Democratic Presidential aspirants to, well, just too many to count.

Post-mortems from Sanders’ last run show that 1) his campaign was rife with the mistreatment, harassment and abuse of women; and 2) Sanders “success,” in large part, was owed to vast and calculated Russian attempts to weaken Hillary Clinton, thereby elevating Trump.

Vladimir Putin’s spot-on theory was that a Trump Presidency would divide and hurt the United States. His tool, which exploited a general American inability to tell fact from fiction in their news feeds, was Facebook.

At least that’s what our intelligence reports say.

“While the right-wing pages promoted Mr. Trump’s candidacy, the left-wing pages scorned Mrs. Clinton while promoting Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate,” federal indictments of the Russian Internet Research Agency explain. “The voter suppression effort was focused particularly on Sanders supporters and African-Americans, urging them to shun Mrs. Clinton in the general election and either vote for Ms. Stein or stay home.”

So why would a guy, who United States intelligence agencies say served as a useful idiot in a massive Russian subversion effort to undermine our elections, run again?

We’ve watched this con evolve over decades so we think we know why.

First of all, he doesn’t even have to pretend to work. In his last Presidential run he missed 104 out of 117 floor votes in the Senate while cashing his $3,365 weekly government checks. What’s more socialist than getting paid for not working?

Second, he gets to fly all over the country sipping champagne and nibbling caviar on his private airplanes. In his last Presidential run he racked up $5 million in private, luxury charter airfare. All between stops in which he scorned greedy rich people and blamed a pending apocalypse on climate change.

Third, and most important, he gets richer for doing nothing other than spewing the same tired lines he wrote in the early 1980s.

And there you have Sanders Democratic Socialism. From each according to ability, all according to Bernie Sanders’ material needs.